Missionaries Teach!

One of the things that all missionaries do a lot of is teaching.  We love to teach!
Sometimes we visit the homes of ward members and leave simple messages of love, hope, encouragement, or messages on topics that bring important things to our remembrance.  This is especially fun as we get to know people one-on-one.  When we teach,  we definitely learn - learn about others and learn about ourselves as we convey our testimonies of the gospel.  We usually learn much more than we teach.

Elder Parker and Poul Pedersen, Aarhus, DK, Dec. 2014

The above picture is of Poul Pedersen, one of our ward members, who joined the church after many years of doing a lot of "colorful" things.  Poul has many life stories to tell while sharing his testimony of the gospel, and it is so fun to hear how he plans to move forward in new directions now centered on living the gospel.

YSA missionaries sometimes get to teach Institute...  That is us and we love that too! We started out teaching a small class of two or three English-speaking young adults who do not speak Danish.  They are usually students living here, but who need to strengthen their English skills for their education.  When the ward Danish-speaking Institute teacher moved to Norway, shortly after we arrived here, the Bishop asked us to teach the whole class in English, and this has been a great opportunity for us to share our personal testimonies of the gospel.  Since some are very new members, we often teach very basic doctrines while encouraging them to stretch to learn more.  We sometimes have investigators visiting with the missionaries, so this adds a wide variety of discussion to our lessons.

The pictures below are from last week's Institute class which consisted of ten SUV (our largest attendance to date for members of record) plus two investigators with the missionaries working with them.  This class was so fun, not just because of the variety of members, languages, etc., but because we have been praying to find ways to grow this program in our area, and this was very encouraging.

We also love to teach with the young missionaries when we get the chance, but they try to find ward members to do that when possible so that the investigators and new converts have ward members to testify and get to know them as well.  We still taught two or three times with them this week.

Marius Sops, new member, Sisters Perkins, Rovig, Parker teaching at our apartment (and eating the cake that Marius brought!)

This morning was also our turn to teach the Gospel Principles class in Sunday School which always has a fun mixture of class members at varying degrees of knowledge concerning religious topics.  Today we were able to teach and bear our testimonies about the need for and importance of a Savior (Jesus Christ).

We also have a good list of ward members for home teaching and visiting teaching, members and part-member families. We have about nine families on that list.  Elder Parker also has the assignment of teaching a newer member how to be a home teacher.  

*Oh, and for our grandchildren - Grandpa Elder Parker taught some of the children we visited how to do one of his magic tricks.  Remember the one of the disappearing handkerchief into his hand?  That one with the tricky thumb always goes well with the kids, and today at church a couple of the younger ones tackled him wanting to know if he had another trick...  We will continue to teach, and love it!